One:lab

14/05/2026

Just published:
Performance Pedagogy: Objects, Transfers, Formations
Edited by Felipe Cervera, Diana Damian Martin, Eero Laine and Theron Schmidt

This book is very special to me -
The chapter ‘Co-Creating: Don’t Be Like Me’ was co-written with Vishnucharan Naidu (Vishnu) who is a founding member of the BTBAF (Business Times Budding Artists Fund) Youth Theatre programme and is currently teaching the seventh (or eighth?) cohort of young people in the fully funded Youth Theatre programme. We began this chapter with a quote that Vishnu brought: ‘Don’t be like me’.

What would you have said as a teenager if your parent told you ‘Don’t be like me’/

‘Don’t be like me’ is a sentence that individuals living in challenging home environments often hear their parents and loved ones say. This prompted Vishnu, my co-writer, to ask the question: Who do you become then? The responses of 8 young performers inspired I AM_____, a verbatim theatre performance that explored the question of who they could be when unconstrained by the labels of failure imposed on them by Singapore’s formal education system.

As we read and responded to draft contributions from authors in this edited collection, the chapter on Cohorts by Eero Laine, Dahye Lee, Robyn Lee, Evan Moritz, Yao Kahlil Newkirk and Bella Poynton made us think about what it meant to be an alumni of BTBAF (The Business Times Budding Artists Fund). Does this cohort formation predominantly identify these young people as financially disadvantaged or immensely talented and deserving of sponsorship and support? When we reconcile ourselves to the conclusion that these young people served by BTBAF are BOTH immensely talented and financially disadvantaged, does artistic talent become a secondary measure of deservedness that reinforces the myth of meritocracy? BTBAF donors are often persuaded to support these young people because they have demonstrated talent in the arts. How does this sit with the belief that the opportunity to express oneself through the arts should be accessible to all, regardless of talent?

Perhaps, if we believe that the arts should not be instrumentalised as an alternative measure of deservedness then we should repurpose the practice of auditioning young people for performance training programmes. What if our performance curriculums were developed based on the young people’s performance needs and openness to learning at these auditions? Then, I suggest, instead of auditioning based on demonstrated artistic potential, we would be creating a curriculum that is responsive to the performers’ needs and enhancing support of their development as artists. Instead of moulding student performers for work in a theatre industry that still has much to do in terms of addressing systemic racism (Bakare 2021; Adebayo et al. 2020) and ableism (Thom 2021), such a curriculum would enable conservatoires to play a more active role in developing performers who will shape a more inclusive theatre industry.

This is the open access link to the book:
https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/monograph?docid=b-9781350399334

And this is the link to our chapter:
https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/monograph-detail?docid=b-9781350399334&pdfid=9781350399334.0010.pdf&tocid=b-9781350399334-0000988

14/01/2026

RiDE 2056: The Futures of Drama Education and Applied Theatre and Performance

What will the terrain of applied theatre, drama education and applied performance look like by 2056?
Will academic journals like RiDE (Research in Drama Education) even exist in 30 years?
What new methodologies and modes of knowledge sharing will there be?
And what is the relationship between possible futures of practice and scholarship and the pasts and presents of the field?
Arguably, this is an age where it has never been more important, and never more difficult, to imagine the future.
What still remains unimaginable?

This special 30th anniversary issue of RiDE brings together fiction, speculative articles, practitioner reflections and research articles from Thailand, Nigeria, Kenya, Canada, Belgium, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Chile, Australia, Singapore, South Africa, USA and the UK.

It has been an honour to work with Nic Fryer and Natalie Lazaroo to bring this issue together over the last 2.5 years (my email archive says we started 31 May 2023).

We have worked really hard with the Editorial Team at RiDE to curate and include submissions that innovatively experiment with what writing and research might be - I am especially thankful to Molly Mullen and Selina Busby for helping us navigate the complex terrain of academic publishing in order to realise our vision for RiDE 2056.

So this is the link to RiDE 2056: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/crde20/30/2

And here's our editorial introduction: https://www.tandfonline.com/.../10.../13569783.2025.2589187

And if you're interested in shaping the future of AI (artificial intelligence) through subversive participation, do consider reading my speculative contribution on AI archives at this link (first 50 downloads/reads are free): https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/HZDATV8ZMASMEXBCDT9M/full?target=10.1080/13569783.2025.2592589

05/06/2025

Take Care: Postgraduate and Early Career Researcher Workshop
Thursday 28 August, 5.15pm-6.30pm

What does it mean to take care - of others, of ourselves, of our research, and of the worlds we inhabit? In today’s increasingly precarious academic and artistic landscapes, care is not just an ethic, but a site of deep struggle, a mode of survival, a form of solidarity, a refusal of disposability, a strategy for collective healing, and a practice of resistance. It is something we extend, receive, perform, withhold, negotiate, and sometimes can only long for. It shows up in the ways we hold space for one another, in the silences of institutional neglect, in our day-to-day rhythms of rest and refusal, and in the improvised choreographies of everyday sustenance. Care, as we see and experience it, is also shaped by context: by race, class, caste, gender, geography, and is often distributed unevenly. It is both structural and intimate; it is both personal and yet, deeply political.

This year’s Theatre and Performance Research Association’s PGR and ECR session invites you to take time and care to enter a creative, collaborative, and a critical exploration of care as it unfolds through our research, artistic and academic practices, and our everyday lives, especially within the precarious conditions that shape the institutions that hold us.

This will be a hybrid session. We will begin with a short collective creative facilitation, drawing from our own practices to initiate conversations on, and imaginations of, care as both an embodied and conceptual practice of resistance. We then move into four facilitated breakout discussions, each looking into different dimensions of care, its need, its presence and its absence in relation to our research. The breakout groups include:

● Balancing Care and Research: For those navigating the challenges of day-to-day caregiving, whether for children, parents, partners, or friends, while holding space for research, teaching and practice.

● Decolonising Care: Reimagining care beyond colonial logics of extraction and productivity, rooted instead in reciprocity and resistance.

● Ecologies of Care: Thinking through the different webs of relationality that connect us and how processes of collective imagination can articulate new pathways of care, sustainability, and resilience.

● [Care]: Exploring the withholding, removal, or strategic absence of care. From institutional neglect to everyday precarities - lost funding, jobs, sudden relocations, invisible labour, we ask: what does it mean to survive and resist in spaces where care is not a given, but has to be demanded, fought for, or furtively snatched?

Together, we hope to hold space for thinking, moving, and imagining differently with care. We warmly welcome PGRs and ECRs from across performance disciplines to join us.

An overview description of the plenary event, Take Care: Postgraduate and Early Career Researcher Workshop.

11/02/2025

And it's out!
Skate/Worlds: New Pedagogies for Skateboarding is Open Access (free to download) and now available online at https://books.ugp.rug.nl/ugp/catalog/book/208. Co-edited with the amazing Sander Hölsgens, featuring 10 chapters and 256 pages of writing by heavy hitters in skate education.

The soft cover/print will follow shortly...they are already available for pre-order at many online bookstores (if you prefer the feeling of paper in your hand).

Cover design: Judith Leijdekkers

- On-site launch event: 10 March, Leiden, NL
- Online launch event: tba with Goodpush Alliance

Contributors: Åsa Bäckström, Rhianon Bader, John
Dahlquist, Jessica Forsyth, Sophie Friedel, Arianna Gil, Sander Hölsgens, Lian Loke, Sanné Mestrom, Douglas Miles, Nadia Odlum, Adelina Ong, Noah Romero, Esther Sayers, Indigo Willing

11/12/2024

CFP: SCALE

Imagined Theatres



Physical Scale - Conceptual Scale - Relational Scale - Collaborative Scale - Cultural Scale - Historical Scale - Performance Scale - Spatial Scale - Durational Scale



Imagined Theatres is interested in work for a special issue “On Scale” for a forthcoming issue of the journal that will be published in late 2025. As an art form that is notoriously resistant to reproduction or replication, performance is similarly resistant to scaling. Often considered in terms that are hyper-local, ephemeral, and live, performance appears to not scale as readily as some communities, goods, services, or even other forms of art. And yet, performance often requires us to think beyond its own spatial and temporal immediacy. That is, we often proceed as if performance will have an impact beyond the immediate and apparent scale of its “ontology.” Additionally, performance is often indexed to a scale that can only be described as “human,” with subjects and objects viewed, heard, and experienced by senses at the human scale. We are interested in work that pushes the limits and boundaries of these performance scales and reconsiders the ways we think in and across the scales of performance—from the micro to the macro, the nano to the planetary, the particular to the universal.



Scale is not only size, of course. Scale is a relation across two points. Perhaps like theatre and performance, which needs a performer and a witness or audience (even as these roles are not strictly fixed), scale describes a way of relating, a connection, a comparative possibility between or among distinct positions. For instance, Sarah Ruhl notes that “an audience of one is not really an audience but instead a form of intimacy, a form of listening” (Ruhl 2014: 134). If the relation between one audience and one performer is intimacy, what is the relation between a performer and one hundred people, or a million or a billion or everyone who has ever lived and will live? Thinking in scales moves us quickly across possibilities and stretches us to think towards impossibilities. That is, even in starting with a basic theatrical equation (audience plus performer), we begin to see the limitations of theatre and performance in terms of duration and space.



We are already familiar with some things that exist on scales that elude our ability to fully comprehend, let alone articulate, from the climate crisis to pandemics to war and political upheavals. Performance can seem inconsequential in terms of its ephemerality and reach—what can a local performance even do in face of such profound, existential problems? Writing about performance can similarly seem to speak to a niche audience too small for the activism required. Yet, thinking with scale and at scale with scholars and artists across the planet, we might reimagine the limits of performance and the possibilities for experimental collaboration.



About the Journal

Imagined Theatres gathers hypothetical performances that explore the limits of what is possible and impossible in the theatre. The project began as a book (published with Routledge in 2017) and now exists as a peer-reviewed open-access journal and archive of scripts, scores, poems, and occasionally non-textual objects, describing or invoking an imaginary event. We publish material by people working in performance as makers and theorists, but also welcome propositions from non-theatrical artists and thinkers.

Here are some examples from the site that show the range of work we publish:

● Mwenya B. Kabwe: http://imaginedtheatres.com/prompts-for-future-africa/

● Andrew Sofer: http://imaginedtheatres.com/private-language-argument-ii/

● Sonia Teuben (of Back to Back Theatre): http://imaginedtheatres.com/this-is-me-draft/

● Harvey Young: http://imaginedtheatres.com/in-character/

● More here: https://imaginedtheatres.com/

Each “theatre” proposes a conceptual event that puts pressure on the expectations and limit cases of performance, whether those bounds are defined by political, financial, ethical, or traditional structures—or the very physical dimensions of time and space. They may be staged in some future theatre or they may exist solely as theoretical provocations. Each piece is set in dialogue with at least one “gloss” that resonates, extends, illuminates, or distorts its host theatre, embracing in the fullest sense of the word “gloss” as an explanation, a concealment, and as a lustrous surface. These responses, too, take on many formal guises, playing at more conventional exegesis or setting off on their own lines of escape: they, too, may be scripts or scores, poems or manifestos, private essays that take up some aspect of the host and move it elsewhere.

Submissions of written texts or in other media are welcome. The journal typically emphasizes short work, ideally under 500 words or 5 minutes of time-based media, but this is not a fixed limit and given the theme of the issue we welcome proposals that defy such guidance. We especially welcome contributions that stretch the theme in both form and content and provoke reconsideration of the possibilities of collaborative authorship.

Please forward submissions of “Theatres” and expressions of interest in writing a “Gloss” to the Issue Editors:

Adelina Ong: [email protected]

Eero Laine: [email protected]

Sozita Goudouna: [email protected]



Deadline for first draft of “Theatres”: February 20, 2025

Anticipated publication: late-2025



About the Issue Editors

Our work on the notion of scale emerges from research conducted through the Ends Network and a forthcoming book on performance amidst what often feels like end times that was co-authored by fifteen performance scholars and artists from across the planet.



Sozita Goudouna (she/her) is visiting professor at Goldsmiths where she initiated the MA on “Breath Studies” and the author of Beckett's Breath published by Edinburgh University Press.



Eero Laine (he/him) is associate professor and chair of the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York.



Adelina Ong (she/they) is an independent applied performance researcher who works with young people from low-income families in Singapore and London (2003 - present).

A host of speculative playlets, skirting genres from fantasy to sci-fi, utopia to dystopia, alternative history to the end of history.